As a little girl, Miranda used to come down from the apartment at night and wander through the store after the clients and the salespeople had gone, pressing her nose into the minks and sables and lynxes and foxes in the Fur Department on three to smell the pungent odor of the pelts, each different; touching the skirts of the gowns in the French Room, on four, and in the Bridal Salon next door. Then down to Sportswear, on two, and then down to the street floor, to Small Leather Goods and Shoes and Accessories, the gleaming cosmetics counters, and all the glittery contents of the locked glass cases of the Jewelry Department. “That you, Miss Mandy?” Oliver, the store’s night watchman, would say to her as he made his rounds with his time clock. “Just don’t leave no fingerprints on the glass or I’ll catch hell from your daddy.” Sometimes, in the dressing rooms, she would encounter some of her father’s special ladies—the ones who had been given their own keys—and sit and listen to them as they gossiped and tried on clothes. Two slender dark-haired women she got to know that way were Gloria Vanderbilt and her friend, Oona O’Neill. Normally, dogs were not welcomed in the store—James kept them on their leashes outside while the ladies shopped—but an exception was made for the pair of borzois belonging to Doris Duke. And a small, angular, homely woman, who seemed to expect deferential treatment and the right to precede other women through doorways, turned out to be the Duchess of Windsor.
“I think we can dispense with the reading of the full inventory of the art collection,” she hears Jake Kohlberg saying. “It is attached as Appendix A to the instrument. I’ve had a copy made for you, Mr. Hockaday, to review at your leisure. The entire collection, or rather the full list of items on this inventory, is bequeathed to the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. However, there are some conditions.”
Mr. Hockaday shifts the position of the briefcase on his lap and sits with his pen poised above his yellow pad.
Jacob Kohlberg reads: “‘Clause forty-six A: A gift in the sum of three million dollars is made to the Museum, to defray the costs of displaying and maintaining my collection, conditional upon the Museum’s acceptance of the full collection and the terms under which it is given. Clause forty-six B: The collection shall be displayed in its entirety, in a special gallery to be designated the Silas Tarkington Collection in letters no less than twelve inches high. Clause forty-six C: My beloved wife shall be permitted to select as many as twenty items from the aforesaid collection and to retain them in her home or homes throughout her lifetime. Testator suggests that Monet’s “Water Lilies,” always a particular favorite, may be one of the works she may wish to retain. But upon her death, those works thusly retained shall be turned over to the Museum proper. Clause forty-six D: In addition to housing, displaying, and maintaining the Silas Tarkington Collection, the Museum shall designate Miss Diana Smith as Special Curator of this Collection and shall employ her in this capacity for as long as she may wish.’”
There is another small, collective gasp in the room.
“Your Honor,” Mr. Hockaday begins.
“You don’t have to call me Your Honor, sir. I am not a judge.”
“Mr. Kohlberg, then. May I interrupt to ask, who is Miss Diana Smith? An art historian, I assume? A Ph.D.?”
“She’s an old friend of my husband’s,” Consuelo Tarkington says softly. “And no, she never actually went to college.”
“She’s the jewelry buyer at Tarkington’s,” Miranda says.
“My husband always felt she had great taste in art.”
Blazer sits forward, and as he does so the tear in his jeans splits wider, revealing more of his knee. “Goddammit, Mandy,” he says, slamming his fist in his palm, “why don’t you tell this fucker the fucking truth? She’s our father’s latest girlfriend, his latest mistress, our old man’s latest piece of ass. She may be the fucking jewelry buyer, but she’s also a thirty-four-year-old piece of old jade herself!”
Miranda shoots a quick look at her mother, whose face is a mask.
“Now, young man,” Jacob Kohlberg begins, “this is neither the time nor the place—”
“Tell the truth, Mandy! You know who Smitty is as well as I do!”
“Blazer, I—”
“May I interrupt again?” David Hockaday asks. “Let me just say that the Museum cannot accept this gift without the approval of the board of directors. And so I must defer acceptance of the gift until the board has met and discussed these somewhat unusual terms and conditions, which may not, I should warn you, prove acceptable.”
“I understand perfectly,” Jake Kohlberg says.
“Our curatorial staff will also want to inspect the items in the collection. This has not yet happened.”
“Perfectly understandable,” Jake Kohlberg says. “So I think any further discussion of Miss Smith is irrelevant at this juncture. Meanwhile, clause forty-seven of the will provides that, should the Museum decline the bequest, the collection, with the exception of those items Mrs. Tarkington may wish to retain for her lifetime, is bequeathed to the aforementioned Miss Smith without further restrictions.”
Blazer stamps out his cigarette in the ashtray and immediately lights another. “So either you get it or the old man’s slut gets it. Take your pick, buddy-boy,” Blazer says. Mr. Hockaday merely lowers his eyes beneath his blond lashes.
Once again Miranda looks at her mother, whose face remains smooth and impassive. How, she wonders, can her mother listen to things like this and register no emotion whatsoever? The stage, she sometimes thinks, lost a great actress when her mother opted for being a tycoon’s wife.
Jacob Kohlberg clears his throat. “Shall we move along?” he says. “There are only a few more items.” He reads: “‘As to my shares of stock in Tarkington’s, Inc., which is located at’—et cetera, et cetera—‘I direct that these be divided equally between my beloved wife and my beloved daughter, Miranda—”
Once more Blazer interrupts. “Now wait a minute,” Blazer says, “I’ve been sitting here for the better part of an hour listening to crap about his beloved this one and his beloved that one. What about his beloved son? Or don’t I figure in this goddamn thing at all? Like I somehow didn’t figure in his obituary?”
Miranda sees Jake Kohlberg’s face redden. “I was just coming to that,” he says. And he reads: “‘My son, Silas R. Tarkington, Junior, is to receive no bequests under this instrument, for reasons he will understand.’”
Blazer jumps to his feet and crushes out his cigarette in the ashtray, all in the same quick movement. “So what the hell?” he says. “Why come all the way up from the Village just to hear that I’ve been zapped in my old man’s will? What a goddamn waste of time!”
“Blazer, that was one of the things he was going to change,” Miranda’s mother says. “I swear to you,” and she reaches out to touch his hand but he pulls away from her.
“I’m not surprised,” he says. “He was always threatening to cut me off without a goddamn penny, and now he’s goddamn done it. But why the hell did you assholes have to drag me all the way up here to tell me he’d done it?”
“Jake, tell him this was one of the things his father was going to change!”
“It’s true,” Jake says. “He’d had a change of heart. Unfortunately—”
“Unfortunately, he changed his goddamn little heart too late!”
“I want to make it up to you, Blazer, out of my share, which is more than I need. I’ll give you—”
“I don’t want your money, Connie! And I don’t want any of his goddamn money!”
“He wanted you to have it. He was angry when he wrote that will, but he forgave you later on. He loved you, Blazer. He loved you very much. He told me so.”
“Well, I never wanted his goddamn love! And you—how can you sit there listening to crap about being his beloved wife? You weren’t his beloved wife any more than my mother was his beloved wife! You were just—what? Just window dressing, no more important to him than one of the plaster mannequins in his Fifth Avenue windows! He didn’t lov
e you, he didn’t love my mother, he didn’t love me, and he didn’t love Mandy. All he ever loved was his goddamn self!”
“Oh, Blazer, Blazer—”
“And meanwhile he was fucking every woman in New York, and you know it. You ought to know it, because he was fucking you while he was married to my mother. Well, you got what you were after, didn’t you, Connie? You got his money.”
“Blazer, don’t say such terrible things about our father,” Miranda says. “Or about my mother, for that matter.”
“Why not? He was a fucking terrible man. He was a terrible father and a terrible husband. He fucked everybody over, and now he’s fucking everybody over from the grave! Look! Look at how he’s trying to fuck over the fucking Metropolitan Museum. Look how he’s fucking you over, Connie, making you share the fucking art collection with Smitty, who was his last good fuck! Well, he’s fucked me over for the last time, and all I can say is I’m glad somebody else killed him, because if somebody else hadn’t killed him I’d probably have done it myself!” He strides toward the door of Jacob Kohlberg’s office, nearly tripping on the untied shoelace. “Fuck you all!” he says. “I never want to see any of you fucking assholes again.” And he pulls the door open, marches out, and slams the door behind him.
In the silence that follows, Miranda looks across at her mother again. Her mother has removed one of her gloves and is twisting it, twisting it, between her hands, but her pale face, framed by the ash-blond hair and the little crescent-moon curls, is still a mask.
“I think he’s been drinking,” Miranda says at last, though she knows it probably isn’t true.
“I want to give him some of my stock, Jake,” her mother says.
“He won’t take it, Mother,” Miranda says. “You know he won’t take it. He’ll never take anything from you. Or me.”
And so, Miranda thinks, that is the way it will be. One half of Daddy’s shares in the store will go to Mother, and the other half will go to me. Neither of us will have a clear majority, and together we can’t possibly have even a consensus. If anything, this arrangement can only turn us into adversaries, even more bitter adversaries than we were before.
In the days since her father’s death, she had dared to hope that things might have been left otherwise, even though she knew such a hope was unrealistic. He had never understood her feelings for the store, and neither had her mother, but to Miranda the store was home. It was the house she lived in. In her wanderings at night, after the store had closed, the racks and counters and fixtures and display cases became her furniture. In her mind, like a fastidious housewife, she changed and rearranged her rooms, mentally experimenting with different groupings, different color schemes. One night, in the shoe department, she had actually rearranged the little gilt chairs and footstools, putting them at conversational angles rather than in a straight row. This gave that corner of the street floor a much more welcoming look, she thought, and surely the department head would notice this when he arrived at the store in the morning. He had indeed noticed, and everything had been quickly replaced exactly as it had been before.
In her fantasy house, she also had fantasy parents. Each of the mannequins, in all their languid poses, was her mother. They all had her mother’s face. This was no accident, no coincidence. In 1985 her father had decided to update the store’s stock of waxen ladies, and suppliers had submitted sketches. But none of their submissions had quite satisfied her father. “Not aristocratic-looking enough,” he kept saying, “not classy enough for us,” so the artists would tear at their hair and go back to their drawing boards. “Show us the kind of woman you have in mind, Mr. Si,” they said at last, and on a sudden impulse he had pulled out some photographs of his wife. “Make them all look like her,” he said. “That’s what my kind of woman looks like.” And so, though Tarkington’s mannequins had been given various hairstyles and coloring, they all had Consuelo Tarkington’s sculptured facial bones.
Consuelo herself had been amused by this. Miranda had found it unnerving, at first, to encounter her mother’s face at every turn in the store, in every room of her house. But then she decided it was better to have dozens of beautiful mothers than no mother at all. These mothers were there whenever she needed one, and they all gazed at her with unerring approval and even curiosity.
After store hours, a new and tangible and approachable father could be found in this house too. He sat in his empty corner office, in an empty chair, behind an empty desk, waiting for her to visit him where, in real life she was not supposed to venture without an appointment or without being announced by Pauline O’Malley. Here was a perfect place to talk to him, where he could give her his undivided attention and listen to her ideas. At night, she would slip into her father’s empty office, close the door behind her, and seat herself opposite the father who was sitting in the empty chair.
“Daddy, I have a plan,” she would say to him. “It’s about me and the store. Please listen to it.…”
And, even though he wasn’t there, he would listen, listen, listen.
That way, he could become the most wonderful, caring father in the world while, downstairs on the selling floors, her mother, in a variety of welcoming gestures, greeted the guests who came to be treated to the wonders of Miranda Tarkington’s store.
When a child isn’t blessed with much in the way of parents, she thinks a little wryly now, the child becomes attached to things.
2
THE SCENE: A drab stretch of West 23rd Street in Manhattan. Outside a nondescript office building, a sign reads: MOSES L. MINSKOFF, DEVELOPER.
THE TIME: A muggy morning in August 1991.
The lights go up to reveal the interior of this establishment: a pair of offices, cheaply furnished. In the smaller of the two rooms, the reception area, MINSKOFF’S secretary, SMYRNA, sits reading a movie magazine and chewing gum. In the larger office, MINSKOFF sits in a swivel chair at his desk, talking on the phone. He is a large man in his shirt sleeves, with an unlighted cigar clamped between his teeth. He wears a yellow Ultrasuede vest, and a heavy gold watch on a gold chain is slung across his middle. In addition to his desk and chair, the principal features of his office are a big old-fashioned Mosler wall safe and a spavined sofa against one wall. The sofa’s condition suggests that MINSKOFF often sleeps here.
MINSKOFF (on the phone): I’m making a credit card call. (He rattles off a fourteen-digit series of numbers. There is a pause.) What? What do you mean that credit card has been canceled? This is an outrage! I shall most certainly report you to your supervisor, young woman!
He slams the receiver down and simultaneously draws a line through the top number in the list of numbers on the pad in front of him. Then he picks up the phone and dials again. Credit card call.… (More numbers.)
Thank you! Thank you for thanking me for using AT&T. I always use AT&T, and with the greatest pleasure, my good fellow!
While he waits for his call to go through, he consults his watch.
Milton? Moe Minskoff here. How’s the weather out there? … Well, it’s hot as hell here. Listen, Miltie, we got a little problem, you and I. You know that rock group you got booked into East St. Louis next Friday night, the Whatchamacallems? … Yeah, the Hot Jockers, that’s them. Well, the fire chief’s brother out there is a good buddy of mine, and it seems like their stadium has a capacity seating of seventy thou. And it looks like you’ve already sold ninety-five thousand tickets to that concert at fifteen bucks a pop.… Yeah, I know you gotta overbook for no-shows, Miltie, and who cares if a few hundred coked-out shvartzers have to sit in the aisles? … Yeah, I know all that.
But listen, Miltie, this fire chief’s brother says the fire chief is real nervous. You’ve oversold by twenty-five thousand tickets! That’s a hell of a lot of no-shows. This fire chief’s brother says if the news got to the papers, the city council or whatever the hell it is would cancel the show and you’d have to fork back the entire gate. We’re talkin’ big bucks, Miltie. We’re talkin’ nearly a mil five, righ
t? … Now wait a minute, Miltie, don’t fly off the handle. All I called for is to try to help you out. No need to make a federal case out of this. We’re just talkin’ fire laws, Miltie, and this fire chief’s brother says that for thirty big ones this fire chief will forget about the whole matter.… Yeah, I think I can get him down to twenty-five. You happy with that figure? … Okay, you Fed Ex the cash to me tonight, and I’ll take care of the whole thing. Plus my fifteen percent commission, naturally.… How’s the wife? Slap her butt for me, Miltie, and have a nice day.
He hangs up and immediately dials another call.
Credit card call … (More numbers.)
Hello, Chief Gomez? Moe Minskoff here. It’s all set, big buddy. I got your ten big ones for you. They’re Fed Exing the cash to me tonight from LA, and I’ll Fed Ex it on to you first thing in the morning, minus my fifteen percent commission, naturally.… Not at all. Don’t thank me. That’s what I’m here for. Let me know if you have any more of these type of problems, and have a nice day.
He hangs up and dials a third call.
Credit card call …
Sal? Moe Minskoff here. Listen, big buddy, we got a little problem. You gotta lower your bid for construction of that casino down in the islands by at least five hundred big ones or you’re outa the ballpark, buddy.… Yeah, the prime minister seems pretty adamant about that.… Well, maybe I could talk him into it if you’d drop the price by three-fifty. But if I do that, Sal, I’m gonna hafta ask you a favor. I want you to put Irving Sender in charge of the construction down there.… You know who Irving Sender is. He’s Honeychile’s brother.… Whaddaya mean who’s Honeychile? Honeychile is my wife, for Christ’s sake! Irving needs a job, and his wife wants to spend the winter in the Caribbean, okay? … Well, I’ll see what I can do. Get back to you, Sal. Have a nice day.
Carriage Trade Page 3
